Up-the-Gut Runner : Leading the WFC in Rushing Has Put Kane on Queasy Street at CSUN

It’s midway through the second quarter and Cal State Northridge and Cal Lutheran are locked in a scoreless football game. Each team’s offense is acting like a boomerang. For every play that goes forward, one comes back.

After a short punt gives Northridge possession near mid-field, Coach Bob Burt decides that his struggling offense needs to raise a little Kane.

The first play is a screen pass to Mike Kane for 11 yards. The next is a Kane run over right tackle for seven. On the following play, Kane takes the ball up the middle, breaks a tackle near the line of scrimmage and rambles 39 yards for a touchdown.

In the end zone, Kane turns, brushes off the excited hug of a teammate, and flips the ball to an official.

There was no celebration spike of the ball for Kane, who felt more like spiking his lunch.

He walked back near the huddle where Mike Doan was lining up for the PAT. Then he turned to leave the field, thought better of it, returned to the huddle--and threw up.

No big deal. Kane says it happens just about every time he busts a big play for a touchdown.

In other words, it happens a lot.

Kane leads the Western Football Conference in rushing and scoring. His career total of 2,606 yards rushing is enough to make any opposing coach’s stomach churn.

Cal Lutheran has the WFC’s toughest defense against the run. The Kingsmen give up an average of only 125 yards a game on the ground. Last Saturday, Kane rushed for 120 himself.

Afterward, Cal Lutheran Coach Bob Shoup called Kane “the best back in the conference.” “No one is as good all-around as he is,” Shoup said. “He plays on the punt team, he catches the ball, he blocks, he’s durable, he can run inside and outside. . . . “

Get the picture? Probably not a true one unless you’ve seen Kane play.

He is 5-10, 185 pounds and as elusive as a Greyhound bus, not a greyhound. His critics say he would have a tough time winning a race against a dairy cow.

Kane has not been timed lately in the 40-yard dash. Burt says he sees no need to pull out a stopwatch.

“I’m sure he doesn’t run a 4.5, but I’ve never seen him get caught from behind, either,” Burt said. “That’s fast enough for me.”

It wasn’t fast enough for major college recruiters, however, who snubbed Kane’s achievements in high school.

Kane went to St. Francis High in La Canada, where he was All-Southern Section, a Catholic All-American and Most Valuable Player in the Del Rey League his senior year. He ran for 1,115 yards, scored 12 touchdowns, and capped his high school career with a 225-yard rushing performance in his final game.

There was nothing left for him to do but wait by the phone for all those major college scholarship offers to roll in.

He got four calls--from Glendale, Pierce and Pasadena community colleges, and from Northridge.

“The one thing Division I recruiters don’t measure is the size of a kid’s heart,” said Brian Fogarty, Kane’s high school coach. “In Mike’s case that certainly made up for anything he lacked in size and speed.”

Said Kane: “It was disappointing. I thought I was good enough to help a lot of teams. I guess I believed more in myself than they did.”

Kane wasn’t exactly an overnight success at Northridge. In fact, he was sixth on the depth chart at the start of his freshman season. The first time his number was called in a game, he went left and everybody else went right.

But when starting tailback Eric Davis injured his knee just before halftime of Northridge’s third game of the season, Kane took over and rushed for 103 yards in the second half. He’s been the starter ever since.

Mike Kane and his twin brother Ed were born in Pasadena, the first and second sons of Patrick and Brenda Kane, Irish immigrants.

Patrick and Brenda were at one time next door neighbors in the small town of Bray, just outside Dublin. Patrick’s two favorite sports when he was growing up were soccer and boxing.

His two oldest sons grew up with the same passions.

Mike and Ed took boxing lessons in Arcadia from former professional featherweight Frank Muche. They were good enough to box on a youth sport television show when they were 11 years old. They both won.

And when Muche had to close his boxing club, the brothers simply turned their attention to soccer.

As seventh-graders, Mike led the entire AYSO conference in scoring, but his brother was the one who made the all-star team.

“He was really mad,” said Ed, who plays soccer for Cal Poly Pomona. “It was a political thing. A lot of coaches’ sons made it and Mike didn’t. He wasn’t going to put up with that. He’s the kind of guy who likes to see results.”

Ed went to Bosco Tech to play soccer and Mike went to St. Francis to play both futbol and football.

Both schools are in the Del Rey League, but since Bosco Tech doesn’t have a football team they met on the playing field only once--in soccer.

“We were ranked second and St. Francis was unranked,” Ed recalled. “They beat us when Mike whizzed about a 30-foot shot right past our goalie. What a shot. He was a good soccer player.”

So good, in fact, that his father tried to persuade him to concentrate on soccer instead of football.

“I thought he had a future in soccer,” Patrick Kane said. “I thought he could make it in the sport if he worked hard enough.”

Said Brenda Kane: “I was always afraid he’d get hurt playing football. I worried all the time . . . until I saw him play.”

Before Kane’s first game for the St. Francis sophomore team, Notre Dame High players taunted him during warm-ups. “We’re gonna get you, Kane,” was the most pleasant thing they said to him.

Kane responded by going 70 yards for a touchdown the first time he carried the ball.

He then trotted to the sideline and threw up.

“That was the first time it ever happened to me,” Kane said. “I guess those guys had me so fired up that my adrenaline got going so fast it made me sick.”

Kane was a starter on the St. Francis varsity for two seasons. He received most of his individual honors his senior year, but it was as a junior that he led the Golden Knights to the Southern Section playoffs.

Terry Terrazone, in his fourth season as coach at St. Francis, was an assistant in charge of the running backs in 1981, Kane’s junior season.

“We played Crespi in our last regular-season game and we had to win to make the playoffs,” Terrazone recalled. “We were behind with less than two minutes to play and we had been throwing to try and get down the field fast. Well, we decided to try one more running play and Mike broke off tackle and went 65 yards for a touchdown. Everyone was mobbing him. The crowd was going crazy and all poor Mike could do was stand off to the side of the field and . . .”

You know the rest of the story.

Kane, a shy and introverted person, has never been one to celebrate much anyway.

When Burt told him he had been selected as one of four team captains this season, Kane told the coach not to expect much vocal leadership.

“I told him that I was going to do the same things I’d always done,” Kane said. “I’m not much of a rah-rah guy.”

He also doesn’t seem to enjoy talking about himself. “Whatever you do, please mention the offensive line,” Kane says at the start of an interview. “All those yards are picked up behind those guys. They’re the best. . . . And don’t forget Coach (Jim) Fenwick, he’s helped me a lot.”

“Yes,” said Brian Clark, starting center and one of Kane’s roommates, “and don’t forget how many guys it takes to get him down. He gets a lot of yards all by himself.”

And he gets them despite being a marked man.

“I don’t think any team can take Kane away, but we tend to focus in his direction,” admitted Shoup of Cal Lutheran. “We told our kids that he’d probably get his hundred yards--just try and stop him from popping a long one for a touchdown.”

Which he ended up doing against Cal Lutheran anyway.

Kane has rushed for more than 100 yards 12 times at Northridge. The Matadors have won 10 of those games. That’s 10 out of a total of 16 wins since he’s been on the team.

As a freshman, Kane stepped in after Davis’ injury to set a single-season rushing record of 851 yards. Northridge was 6-4. As a sophomore, despite missing the better part of four games with a sprained left foot, Kane led the team in rushing with 675 yards and in receptions with 30. The Matadors’ record, however, fell to 2-8.

Former Coach Tom Keele then discarded the Matadors’ pro-set offense before last season and installed a complex passing attack called the run-and-shoot.

That left Kane, already the school’s career leader in rushing attempts, as a pass blocker on most plays.

It was an unfamiliar role, and one he didn’t care for. Reporters came around, Kane said, and tried to get him to air his disappointment publicly. He refused.

“They tried to make it sound like I wanted to transfer, but it was never that way,” Kane said. “I love playing football and I couldn’t be mad enough to quit or transfer no matter what offense we were playing.”

But Kane added, “I really didn’t understand why he felt we had to pass all the time, though.”

Keele’s pass-happy offense and another foot injury that caused him to miss four games, limited Kane’s rushing total to 481 yards.

Two weeks after the season ended, Keele was fired. The run-and-shoot offense left with him. When Burt was hired in January, one of the first things he said at his introductory news conference was that the run-and-shoot was out.

That was good news for Kane. But Kane said the new coach was giving him indications--real or imaginary--that he was more interested in watching the progress of other running backs.

“He didn’t talk to me much,” Kane said. “But whenever one of the other guys made a good play, he really praised him. Maybe he was trying reverse psychology or something, I don’t know. I don’t want this to sound like I’m complaining, because I’m not. But it did make me work that much harder.”

Burt said that he had little to judge Kane on before he saw him in a game. The few films the coach had seen were games in which Kane didn’t play much because of his injury.

“What Mike does well doesn’t really show in practice,” Burt said. “You don’t see him bouncing off tackles, making cuts and accelerating into the hole.

“The first time he really impressed me was right after he got his butt chewed at halftime of the alumni game. The first thing he did in the second half was go 48 yards for a touchdown.”

Kane remembers the circumstances. “We came in for halftime and Coach (Rich) Lopez came up to me and said, ‘You’re injury is over, Mike. Start running hard.’

“That really hit me. No one had ever accused me of not running hard before.”

He hasn’t stopped since. And Burt seems quite content with getting him the ball.

Kane has 113 of the 209 carries Northridge running backs have this season. He has accounted for 61.2% of the team’s rushing yardage and his 14 pass receptions for 184 yards also leads the team.

“We never really plan to build our offense around him, but its something that just seems to happen during a game,” Burt said. “We give him the ball and, bang, he gets 10 yards. It kinda just makes sense to give it to him when he keeps making the yards.”

And what if a team does manage to stop him? “Then they’ll have to give us something else,” Burt said. “But I doubt that will happen. Trying to stop Michael Kane is like me trying to run 10-flat 100. I can try and try, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever gonna happen.”

But with all the impressive statistics he has and praise he receives from coaches and opponents, there is a good chance that Northridge’s last game of the season will be the last of Kane’s career.

“I would like to think that some pro team would give him a shot, but realistically, I think the chances are slim,” Burt said. “They’ll say he’s too small. Well, he may look small, but I’ve seen him knock a lot of big linebackers right on their butts.”

Kane says he tries not to think about his football career ending. “I’m going to dread that last game. It’ll be the toughest time of my life. When it’s all over, I’ll probably cry my eyes out.”

He says he’d rather be remembered for his style than his records.

“I just want the people who know of Northridge football to remember me as a tough kid. A guy who gave it everything he had.”

A very tough kid. With a very queasy stomach.